Chanel / Fall 2014 RTW

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Karl Lagerfeld has never set foot in a supermarket, but that minor detail was of little consequence when he set out to create one as a setting for his fall Chanel collection.

“The whole thing is related to Pop Art,” he explained, alluding to Andy Warhol’s early appropriation of mass-market commodities and packaging. Karl saw this as a development from his sensational art-gallery environment created for the spring show. “The Art one was an art supermarket, because art has become a product, no?” he explained during a fitting, reasoning that there was no better way to showcase the Chanel product than in a more literal evocation of a supermarket. Karl has a unique grasp of the contemporary Zeitgeist, and a febrile imagination that resulted in an unforgettable collection and a fashion décor that will go down in history as a tour de force of wit and invention.

“I think a little humor is needed,” said Karl, proudly noting that 500 different products had been repackaged and labeled. The invitees (and, later, the models) became the customers, passing through the checkout counters and the aisles to a fully stocked store quite miraculously assembled under the glassy domes of the Grand Palais. They were greeted with a pyramid of coconuts promoting, naturally, “lait de coco” (coconut milk in French). On those shelves there were first-aid kits and household paints (with colors that included Dore Saint-Honoré, Rouge Coromandel, and Gris Jersey). There were chainsaws, and doormats stamped Mademoiselle Privé (repeating the message on Coco Chanel’s studio door), and rubber gloves with gardenias attached. There were Perles de Lessive washing powders. The men’s toiletries were named for Boy Capel, Chanel’s dashing lover, and there were Les Confitures de Tante-Adrienne—jams named for her aunt. There were bottles of Eau de Chanel mineral waters, and even the collection’s press photos were presented in a giant Chanel-branded matchbox.

Luckily, however, Karl had not exhausted his clearly inexhaustible skills in thinking up all this drollery—the brilliantly colored clothes were fantastically inventive, too.

Cara Delevingne opened the show, romping down Aisle 5 and stopping to appraise products that caught her eye, wearing moth-eaten joggings, a tweedy coat in the curvy volumes of the season (with especially emphatic, rounded sleeves), and trainers borrowed from the sportif Chanel spring couture show. Those flat sport shoes (sometimes extended with gaiters to become boots) gave the collection—even the ironic bourgeois suits with swinging skirts and classic braided jackets—its easy contemporary attitude.

Also inspired by the haute couture were the neo-corset midriff insets in the coats and jackets—this time seamed with zippers (“If you eat too much at lunch, you can unzip one or two,” joked Karl)—and the iridescent metallic and cellophane threads and highlights that shimmered like rainbows across the complex tweedy weaves and embroideries.

The house’s superbly innovative fabric development included thick, textured tweeds in colors pulled from the grocery aisle—including broccoli, carrot, beetroot, and corn—that were used for swing coats with a strong pyramid line to them and marled knits like those Chanel herself created in the twenties, used for sweater-and-leggings sets.

There was much use of the padding and quilting theme of the season—let’s not forget it’s a house icon, as Chanel used it for her iconic 2.55 purse—as well as a bold print that evoked Karl’s personal passion for the Memphis Group collective of decorative artists and designers of the eighties.

Disposable fashion? On the contrary. As Karl’s muse Lady Amanda Harlech noted during the fitting, caressing the gloriously tactile fabric swatches pinned to his sketches, “It’s a sort of challenge. Because it’s mass production, but it’s impossible to reproduce the textiles, trims, and embroideries.”

“It’s Chanel beyond Chanel!” said Karl, clearly having the last laugh.